What is the Conservation Status of the Whales in the Southern Ocean?

Outside of Japan there is very little support from
the scientific community.

This is simply an attempt to use science as an
excuse to profit from the slaughter of whales - just commercial whaling in a
poor disguise.

The Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR) is a front for commercial whaling.
It has been a front for commercial whaling since 1987 and was established in
response to the implementation of an international ban on commercial whaling by
the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1986.

The international scientific community does not regard research conducted by
Japanese whalers as legitimate. There is no science involved; it’s all a con and
a masquerade and that is what it has been since 1987.

The ICR is little more than a bogus front for an illegal enterprise heavily
subsidized by the Japanese government and influenced greatly by the nefarious
manipulations of the Japanese Yakuza.

It is interesting that for years ever since I was tipped off about Yakuza
involvement I have never had a single spokesperson for the ICR or the Japanese
government deny my publicized accusations about Yakuza involvement. The fact is
that the Japanese Union that provides crew to the Japanese whaling fleet is a
Yakuza controlled union.

Nazi propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels once remarked that if a lie is told
often enough people will begin to see the lie as truth.

The lie the ICR has been telling for twenty-three years is emblazoned on the
side of the floating abattoir named the Nisshin Maru. In big bold white
lettering conveniently written in English is the word “RESEARCH.”

There are no sophisticated laboratories on this sea-going slaughterhouse, but
there is machinery for cutting-up, flash-freezing, and efficient packaging of
frozen whale meat.

The slaughter of the Antarctic Minke whale has been justified by the Japanese
insistence that Minke whale populations are growing rapidly. However a recent
and much more credible study by Stanford University based on real research on
Minke whale DNA has found that the populations are in fact not increasing.

The study states, “An analysis of Minke whale DNA, by a Stanford research
team has revealed that the current population of Antarctic Minke whales is well
within the historical norm of the species over the last 100,000 years. There is
no absolutely evidence of a significant increase in the population of Antarctic
Minke whales.”

The ICR has been claiming that the population of Antarctic Minke whales has
risen significantly since World War II and that Japan's so called scientific
whaling program has been "sampling" increasing numbers of them each year on the
grounds that reducing the number of Minkes is actually a benefit to the whales.

In other words, they have to kill them to save them. Conveniently the
“samples” end up on the plates of diners in Japanese restaurants and in the
freezer section of Japanese supermarkets.

The ICR continues to insist that Minke populations are increasing. However,
this new scientific analysis of the whales' DNA by the Stanford research team
has demonstrated the opposite conclusion. There is no evidence of a significant
increase in the population of Minke whales and the research demonstrates that
the current population of Antarctic Minke whales has not risen above what it has
been since World War II:

According to the study:

Based on our genetic analysis, average Antarctic Minke whale populations
over the past 100,000 years have been around 670,000," said Stephen Palumbi,
professor of biology, director of Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station and senior
fellow at the university's Woods Institute for the Environment. "That number
easily falls within the range of current population estimates for the whales, as
determined in studies by the International Whaling Commission," he said. Palumbi
is the senior author of a paper describing the work, published in the journal
Molecular Ecology.

The controversy over the numbers of Antarctic Minke whales is rooted in the
early 20th century, when commercial whalers killed an estimated 2 million large
baleen whales in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. Blue, Humpback, Fin and
Sei whale populations all plummeted.

According to some estimates, those whales, if they were still around,
would annually eat as much as 150 million pounds of krill, a tiny,
shrimp-like crustacean that is a dietary staple of all baleen whales. Some
researchers have suggested that with so many large whales gone, the reduced
competition for krill has created an opportunity for the Minke to flourish.

According to the report, “If the Antarctic Minke whale population has boomed,
then their large numbers might be inhibiting the recovery of other whale species
that had been overexploited. This idea has been heavily promoted by the Japanese
Ministry of Foreign Affairs as one of the main justifications for Japan's annual
slaughter of Minke whales. But until now, no one had any scientific data to
either support or refute the theory of a minke population boom.”

"You can look at a claim of Minke whales being super abundant as being a
testable scientific hypothesis that has been sitting there for a very long time,
without being tested or refuted," Palumbi said. "So we decided to work out the
ways of testing that hypothesis."

To determine whether the current population of Minke whales represents a
boom, Palumbi's team, including postdoctoral researcher Kristen Ruegg, had to
compare it to population numbers over tens of thousands of years. Trying to
estimate the population of any animal species that far back in time is obviously
a challenge, but by looking at the variability in modern DNA, researchers can do
just that.

A type of genetic mutation called a "silent mutation" is a minor change to an
individual's DNA that has no effect on its ability to survive. These silent
mutations are passed on to subsequent generations and add to a population's
genetic diversity over time. Because the mutations occur at a predictable rate,
the accumulation of mutations– and the variability – in modern individuals can
be used to work backward and estimate what the population size had to have been
at a given point in the past for the number of mutations in the modern whale's
DNA to accumulate.

"We have done a lot of work over the last couple of years on pinning that
mutation rate down, estimating the variability in rate across many genes and
applying it to a well-accepted model of how DNA evolves," Palumbi said. "Those
advances have come out in a series of papers over the last couple of years, and
so we were ready to use this to test the Minke boom hypothesis."

But the first challenge in doing the analysis was simply obtaining some DNA.
Mounting an expedition to the frigid waters of the Antarctic is neither easy nor
inexpensive, but there is one place where Minke whale DNA can be obtained with
relative ease – the seafood markets of Japan. Whale meat is sold in these
markets to help defray the cost of the Japanese scientific whaling voyages.

Palumbi's team has been going to Japan to obtain Minke meat for the last 15
years, collaborating with Oregon State University scientist Scott Baker, and has
developed a network of buyers who visit fish markets throughout central Japan
for them.

Ironically, the only scientific research being done was by American
researchers using whale meat taken by the Japanese whalers. This research has
proven the Japanese theories wrong. Perhaps the Japanese came to the same
conclusion with their own research, but we don’t know about it because their
research remains unpublished.

The Stanford team set up their own mobile molecular lab in Japan.

"They bring the meat to us and we set up a little molecular lab in our hotel
room in Tokyo and extract and copy the DNA there in the hotel," he said. The
team then brings back a "gazillion" copies for analysis.

The report continues:

The average population of 670,000 Minkes that Palumbi's team estimated with
their DNA analysis falls well within the population estimates by the
International Whaling Commission for the late 20th century. The commission
supervised several field surveys that estimated the Antarctic Minke whale
population was about 608,000 between 1978 and 1984, and roughly 766,000 from
1985 to 1991.

Palumbi said the Japanese estimate the current Minke population at 760,000.
"They put that number on every package of Minke whale meat that they sell,"he
said.

An unpublished 2006 report of another population survey supervised by the
commission suggests that the Minke population may actually be declining, rather
than booming or remaining steady.

None of the estimates support the notion of a late 20th-century population
explosion of Antarctic Minke whales when compared with Palumbi's historical
estimate.

"The hypothesis of a population explosion resulting from krill abundance has
no validity," Palumbi said. "We can refute it, and that failed idea is no reason
whatsoever to be hunting Minke whales."

Palumbi said the larger goal of the study was to provide accurate information
to use in managing the Antarctic minke whale population. "What any kind of
management needs is scientific data," he said.

"If you don't test a hypothesis, if you just assert that something is really
important and then move on to your management plan from that standpoint, then
not only is that management plan likely to be wrong, but you have no way of
improving it over time," he said.

The Japanese have not explained the reasons they have added endangered Fin
and Humpback whales to their kill quota. Fortunately, Sea Shepherd has prevented
the killing of these whales by slowing the fleet down. Normally the Fins are
killed after the Minke whales, and when Sea Shepherd slows down the Minke whale
quota it affects the Japanese whaling fleet’s ability to pursue Fin whales. Only
one Fin whale has been slain in the last two years due to Sea Shepherd’s
efforts. The Japanese have not attempted to kill a Humpback whale because of
political pressure resulting from the negative publicity about their illegal
whaling activities.

In July 2009, New Scientist magazine stated that there was no scientific
validity to Japan’s so- called research whaling. The scientific committee of the
IWC rejects the validity of the ICR research. Outside of Japan there is very
little support from the scientific community.

This is simply an attempt to use science as an excuse to profit from the
slaughter of whales - just commercial whaling in a poor disguise.

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